Exploring Facebook's massive, picture-painting AI brain

(Vjeran Pavic) Tweet Share Inside a 350,000-square-foot building in the hills of Prineville, OR, slotted inside a nondescript server rack, is one of Facebook’s most valuable artificial intelligence tools. It’s called Big Sur, and it’s a hardware system for training software to improve itself over time. It uses enormous amounts of data, funneled in from all over the world, and taps into the building’s extraordinary computing power to accelerate a process that once took months down to a matter of hours. With Big Sur, Facebook is able to train AI processes that power board-game-playing programs and help software “read” photos and explain their contents back to people. Big Sur systems can be found inside the second of Facebook’s Prineville data centers, on a site where ground was first broken only…